There is something satisfactory in
returning to a wild place that you know well, a place beyond your
everyday life, yet that is familiar because it holds a piece of your
own history. If you are drawn back to such places, for whatever
reasons, you may find that the combination of their wildness, their
beauty and their familiarity invites you both backwards and forwards
into your life in a mix that is compelling.
Yellowwood is such a place for me, a
place that is within the geographical proximity of my everyday
experience and yet far beyond it. Today the higher ground, everything
above the foot slopes, is hidden in a cloud that has been stripped
away from the plains over which I drove this morning, but still
shrouds these mountains.
I have set out later than I planned to
and alone. None of the friends I called to join me were free. I soon
leave behind the thin line of highway with its verge of weeds and
cast aside broken, plastic bits of civilization. The ingrained memory
of pushing wearily through a tangle of rocks and fynbos, late
in a long cycle of intense effort, makes me, on these occasions, want
to perfect a line of least resistance through here. And to channel
those who will follow into a single path, for both their own
individual ease and, over time, to contribute to a communal ease. A
shared path in these places makes for much easier passage.
My Swiss mountain friend, Jurgen says
that the fynbos is not fyn bos at all. It is
rofbos. Rof it is indeed, in character and underfoot.
It makes the Western Cape mountains an unruly and unkempt distant kin
of the alpine meadows of Jurgen's childhood. And yet he loves them,
delights in those kind of trips that I tend to feel are best
appreciated in retrospect. When the entangling scratchiness of
impossibly slow progress is forgotten and only the glow of it
remains. But when you realise that someone else is thriving in what
you have presumed is universally experienced as horrible, it can
transform your experience. And so I wonder about this desire to
channel a communal passage and what drives it. Should I be attempting
to influence the experience of those that choose to come here, to
alter in any way what is?
When I make cairns I try to combine a
consciousness of the cairns themselves as well as the path that they
mark. I try to make them beautiful, to achieve an aesthetic and
stable balance, not merely a jumble of strewn stones. And for that I
use flat stones in a single pile, turned and sequenced to balance
best. But it is an art that must be performed quickly for it is done
on the move. Too much pondering, too much trial and error spoils it.
It is an art that must trust the first thought from the options that
present: the choice of stone, weighed and touched fleetingly, of
sequence. This way or that way up?
Invariably some work better than
others. Gravity is an objective judge whose harsh and weighty
appraisal has shaped this entire mountain. And yet it troubles to
judge each of my small cairns carefully and equally. I pass previous
cairns of mine that have been harshly judged and sweep the remaining
rubble aside or build them anew. Perhaps a different possibility
presents itself.
Up near the cloud base it is muggy,
although the wind cools. The first sips from my camel pack, those
that come from the exposed length of pipe over my shoulder, are cool.
But those that follow are warmed from the exertion through my back.
It is always steeper than I expect, and further. I take small sips of
coolness.
The spot where the camera stands is a
quiet place, a place where the cliffs on the side of the gorge run up
against the scree forest of its base. All who pass here, I hope, will
take this narrow passage, regardless of any cairns that mark it. The
spot is also a natural pause on an ascent or descent of this gorge.
Several times I have dropped my pack and rested here amongst the
trees with my back against the cool rock.
I have no way of knowing what the
camera has seen until I get home and put the memory card in my
computer. It is a little like the delayed gratification of the
pre-digital film era. It feels appropriate to this place. There is a
pleasure in knowing that not everything is available, always, and
everywhere.
Before I leave, I spend time fiddling
with the camera, moving it slightly left, securing it. Wondering what
might have passed. Hoping. There are fresh scratches on the tree. I
wonder how the timing of them has corresponded to the battery life of
the camera.
It is evening when I return home.
Friends are having drinks in our garden. It is good to sit, to feel
the physicality of what I have done, in my legs, the rofbos
scratches on my skin. I am not in a hurry to look at the pictures.
Last time they had been disappointing and I am expecting the same,
somehow. But later Sebastian asks for the disk and we all drift
inside and gather around my laptop once he slips it in.
One of the first pictures is of a
genet. “Oh cool”, the kids exclaim. Then a few birds.
There is a synchronous exhalation from
all of us gathered around the computer, like from the crowd at a
sports match, when the first picture of her appears. And then there
is another and another. Another photo and another animal and another.
There is a sense of something expanding into the space of the shared
witnessing of what is being revealed on the monitor before us. Each
is a revelation that goes deeper and deeper behind the two
dimensionality of the screen. There is a rare and precious beauty
that is close to us, but that remains hidden, that we vaguely know is
there, but when we witness it, amazes us.
Later that night I take great pleasure
in sending the images out to a wider audience. Like the unexpected
sparkle of sunlight from a rock pool on a hot, dry day, they cannot
fail to charm, to excite, to mesmerise. And I relish the play of
light that comes back to me.
In the beginning of Desert
Solitaire, Edward Abbey talks about surfaces in a way that makes
me re-think them. The surface of things is often enough, he says. The
textured patterns of lichen brought into close focus before my face
on the short rock scramble below. The sharp edge of a crack cleaving
a boulder. The sweeping height of the wall above, seen momentarily
through swirling cloud. The supreme beauty of a leopard marking its
territory in sharp scratches in the roughly textured bark of a
Kershout tree.
Note: the camera captured 3 different leopards, a male plus a mother and cub. For more information on these leopards have a look at: Cape Leopard Trust news
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